Guessing a Number to Win a Cross

The setup: At his wife’s (super religious) family reunion, a Baptist minister was asking everyone in the audience to guess a number to win a prize. He gave away t-shirts and pins…

Then came the finale. With a bit of ceremony, he produced a small wooden box. He told a story of being approached by a man who was raising money for local church kids to go to camp, something like that. He’s a good storyteller and loves an audience, so when at length he opened the hinged box and revealed the contents, he got himself a nice Ooooooo from the congregation.

It was an unusual pendant, a chain of copper-colored beads, and hanging at the end, a large black cross with splayed ends, a kind of extended Coptic cross. It was made of black glass, maybe obsidian, with swirls of metallic blue and copper.

“Now,” he said. “I want you to write down another number between 1 and 100 to see who gets this cross.”

I could claim that I hesitated a moment, that I pondered what to do, whether to participate, but no. Instead, I did what the other 45 people in the room did — I wrote a number on the back of a piece of paper and folded it up. That was the normal thing to do, after all. But this is the moment that was shortly to embarrass my fine boy.

Dale got the number dead on. (If you think about it for a bit, you can probably guess it, too.) It’s even more amusing when you realize the religious folks knows he’s an atheist. But that’s part of the problem:

… here’s where “be out and normal” breaks down a bit. It’s hard to quickly figure out the “normal” way for an atheist among Baptists to accept a cross that he has won (by way of religious insight) from a minister who is also his wife’s uncle. But it’s not hard to figure out why the same moment embarrasses the atheist’s teenage son, sitting at a table of his Baptist cousins.